Australian fairy tales | 澳大利亚童话

驻印度新德里记者

人们通常认为童话具有“普世性”和“永恒性”，但这其实是一种误解，讲述童话故事的时代和地点所代表的价值观，早已在这些故事中留下了深深的烙印。由于澳大利亚原住民遭受掠夺，他们的生活方式也被颠覆，澳大利亚的早期童话故事不是像欧洲那样由当地流传已久的口头讲述或文学传统发展而来，而是由白人定居者编写的。这些文学故事讲述了澳大利亚自然风貌的起源，讲解了这片土地的历史，并帮助小读者认识当地的动植物。

最早的澳大利亚童话故事重复着英国和欧洲大陆的故事内容，不过把背景换成了澳大利亚的荒野丛林或内陆。这其中最出类拔萃的，是20世纪30年代初出版的《澳大利亚童话：三只树袋熊和金发小女孩》（The Three Koala Bears and Little Goldilocks: An Australian Fairy Tale），一名小女孩（实为演员）和几只考拉（树袋熊）在人工搭建的场景中互动的照片构成了这个故事的主线。

这些照片是由澳大利亚早期电影制片公司Cinesound拍摄的。书中配文讲述，从前有“三只澳大利亚小熊”住在灌木丛里，它们吃桉树叶，用“白色的小碗喝牛奶”。金发女孩就住在灌木丛旁边，她不出意料地吃光了小熊们的食物，除了那些不好吃的桉树叶。这本书的最后一页介绍了这一“澳大利亚国宝”动物的特点和饮食习惯。殖民时代童话故事的主旨往往是为儿童讲解当地的自然环境，这或许是由于人们认为童话故事是重要的教育工具，也可能是由于动物和森林常常出现在童话题材中。

寻根溯源

一些童话故事集讲述了澳大利亚自然风貌的变迁，例如奥尔加·恩斯特（Olga Ernst）创作的《金合欢之地的童话故事》（Fairy Tales from the Land of the Wattle）（1904年）。“金合欢的起源”讲的是，从前在澳大利亚南部艾尔湖一带的内陆地区，居住着“人称‘湖之子’的仙女一族”。如今的艾尔湖是一处咸水湖，不过在故事里，这里曾经“丰饶多产”，但平原逐渐变得“贫瘠荒凉”。失去了植物和动物的仙女们生存岌岌可危，只有仙族之王奥布朗（Oberon）才能救她们，他可以改变仙女的身形样貌，好让她们免于死亡。美丽的仙女们长着金色的长发，像“可爱的金球”一样在林间翩然摇曳。仙王奥布朗把仙女们变成了种子，在丛林大火熊熊燃烧之时，让飞鸟把种子带到维多利亚州，四处散播。后来，这些种子长成了金合欢树（Acacia pycnantha），金合欢的花朵成为澳大利亚的象征。

“从仙女这个形象可以清楚地看出，早期澳大利亚童话故事如何通过白人定居者的视角重新建构当地环境”

作者笔下仙王奥布朗和不知名的金发仙女等人物的刻画，清楚地说明早期澳大利亚童话故事如何通过白人定居者的视角，特别是通过借用英国和欧洲传统故事中的人物形象来重新建构当地环境。

谁害怕大坏蛋本耶普？

在恩斯特的故事里，居住在澳大利亚内陆地区的是仙女“一族”，完全看不到原住民的影子，这是殖民时期童话故事惯有的处理方法。玛丽·汉内·福特（Mary Hannay Foott）的《布塔和本耶普：澳大利亚小红帽》(Butha and the Bunyip: An Australian Little Red Riding Hood）（1891年）的独特之处在于，故事里出现了原住民角色，描写了他们对乡土的依恋（原住民将生长于斯的土地称为“乡土”）。福特的故事主角是原住民女孩布塔，她和父母住在一起，她家附近常可以捕猎到小袋鼠、袋狸和负鼠等动物。有一次，布塔赶夜路去给奶奶送吃的，她在一个人的脚印旁边发现了一串血迹，布塔最终查清了让那人受伤的罪魁祸首——是水怪本耶普干的。源自原住民神话的本耶普在这里替代了狼的角色，这是一种水陆两栖的恐怖生物，捕食动物和儿童，常出没于湖泊、河流、水洼或死水潭附近。

福特笔下的主人公像是“小红帽”的翻版，演绎了聪明机智的小女孩智取恶狼的故事。本耶普张开长长的尖嘴巴，气势汹汹又饥肠辘辘，布塔从背包里拿出各种美食来安抚这个怪物。在认为原住民需要得到白人的“保护”、有待脱离原始状态的文化氛围中，《布塔和本耶普》将欧洲人在森林里遭遇危险时的绝境求生故事搬到了荒野丛林，同时凸显了原住民娴熟地运用多种方法在家乡土地上获取丰富的资源。

拟人化的考拉

殖民时期，欧洲童话故事传统被移植到了澳大利亚这片新的土地上。在前后大约四十年间，澳大利亚作家在自然环境、民族认同和儿童童话之间建立起了明确的关联。不过，这一类澳大利亚童话的持续时间比较短，到20世纪30年代已基本消失。后来的澳大利亚儿童作家不再重复外来童话故事的人物和情节，开始撰写原创的丛林奇幻故事，例如梅·吉布斯（May Gibbs）创作的《小胖壶和小面饼》（Snugglepot and Cuddlepie）系列讲述了“桉树果宝宝”的故事（始于1918年），多萝西·沃尔（Dorothy Wall）的《眨眼睛比尔》（Blinky Bill）以一只拟人化的小考拉作为故事主人公（始于1933年）。

"澳大利亚作家从20世纪30年代开始撰写原创的丛林奇幻故事"

如今的澳大利亚成人作家和儿童作家在创作时再次借鉴了童话传统，这其中包括凯特·福赛思（Kate Forsyth）和玛戈·拉纳根（Margo Lanagan）。但一个明显的区别是，他们的作品中体现出了原住民的声音，亚历克西斯·赖特（Alexis Wrigh）的小说《天鹅之书》（The Swan Book）（2013年）就是其中一例：在末世般的未来，有人在一棵桉树里找到了一名原住民年轻姑娘，她不会说话，失去了记忆，而且此时距离她失踪已有十年之久。这与澳大利亚早期童话故事中的金发仙女形象相去甚远。

Fairy tales down under

The first Australian fairy tales were inspired by European stories transplanted to the bush, to familiarise colonists’ children with their new environment.

 Michelle J. Smith

While popularly misunderstood as “universal” and “timeless”, fairy tales are strongly embedded within the values of the time and place in which they are told. Early Australian fairy tales did not develop from enduring local oral or literary traditions as in Europe but were most often written by white settlers, as First Nations peoples were dispossessed, and their ways of life displaced. These literary tales provided origin stories for Australia’s natural features, explained the history of the land, and attempted to familiarise child readers with native flora and fauna. 

The first Australian fairy tales were retellings of British and European tales that were transferred into bush or outback settings. The Three Koala Bears and Little Goldilocks: An Australian Fairy Tale, published in the early 1930s, is one of the most remarkable of these stories as it is oriented around still photographs of the interactions between a live girl actress and several koalas placed in staged situations. The images were taken by Cinesound, an early Australian film production company. The written text introduces the reader to a once upon a time in which “three little Australian bears” lived in the bush eating gum leaves and drinking “milk from little white bowls”. Goldilocks now resides on the edge of the bush and as expected, consumes the bears’ food, apart from the unappealing gum leaves. The final page of the book includes information about the characteristics and diet of “Australia’s National Pet”. Whether because of the perception of the fairy tale as a valuable educational tool, or the genre’s common depictions of animals and forest settings, colonial fairy tales commonly sought to explain local natural environments. 

A quest for the origins

Olga Ernst’s Fairy Tales from the Land of the Wattle (1904) is one of several fairy-tale collections that sought to provide origin stories for natural features. “The Origin of the Wattle” locates a “race of fairies, called ‘The Children of the Lake’” in the interior regions of Australia surrounding Lake Eyre (Kati Thanda) in South Australia. While today it is a salt lake, the story observes that the area was once “fruitful and productive” but that the plains gradually became “barren and desolate”. The fairies are at risk of perishing with the loss of plants and animals, and the only solution to their survival rests with Oberon, the king of the fairy tribes, who might change their form to spare them from death. The beautiful fairies look like “lovely golden balls” as they float between the trees with their golden hair. Oberon changes the fairies into seeds, which are distributed by birds into the state of Victoria during bushfires. The seeds grow into wattle trees, with the blossoms of the golden wattle (Acacia pycnantha) becoming an iconic Australian symbol. 

"The use of fairies is a clear illustration of how early Australian fairy tales reframed the environment through the perspective of white settlers"

The use of Oberon and unnamed blonde-haired fairies is a clear illustration of how early Australian fairy tales reframed the environment through the perspective of white settlers, specifically through the importation of characters from British and European traditions. 

Who’s afraid of the big bad bunyip?

Ernst’s description of the fairies as a “race” that inhabited Australia’s interior in the seeming absence of First Nations people is typical of the genre in the colonial period. Mary Hannay Foott’s Butha and the Bunyip: An Australian Little Red Riding Hood (1891), however, is unique in that it depicts First Nations characters and their engagement with Country (an aboriginal term for the land to which they are connected). Foott’s protagonist is an Aboriginal girl named Butha who lives with her parents in a region filled with animals to hunt, such as wallabies, bandicoots and possums. On an overnight journey to bring food to her grandmother, Butha discovers a trail of blood after a man’s tracks and eventually discovers the cause of his injury: a bunyip. This creature, which fills the role of the wolf, originates in First Nations mythology: the bunyip is amphibious and is feared for preying on animals and children, particularly near lakes, rivers, waterholes, or billabongs. 

Foott’s protagonist resembles Little Red Riding Hood variants in which the girl is a trickster who can outwit the wolf: Butha placates the hungry, threatening bunyip with its “long-snake bill”, by offering him various items of food from her bag. In a cultural climate in which First Nations people were seen as in need of white “protection” and modernisation, “Butha and the Bunyip” maps a familiar story of survival in the face of the dangers of the European forest onto the bush and highlights the ways in which First Nations people were highly practiced in obtaining plentiful resources from the lands on which they lived. 

An anthropomorphic koala

European tale traditions were transplanted onto new soil in Australia during the colonial period. Across approximately forty years, Australian authors cultivated an explicit relationship between the environment, national identity, and fairy tales for children. Yet the Australian children’s fairy tale was a comparatively short-lived phenomenon that had largely disappeared by the 1930s. Instead of reproducing imported fairy-tale characters and stories, Australian children’s authors began to write their own original fantasy stories set in the bush, such as May Gibbs’ Snugglepot and Cuddlepie books about the “gumnut babies” (which began in 1918) and Dorothy Wall’s Blinky Bill books, which featured an anthropomorphic koala (which began in 1933). 

“From the 1930s, Australian authors began to write their own original fantasy stories set in the bush”

Today, Australian authors for both adults and children are once again drawing on fairy-tale tradition in their fiction, including Kate Forsyth and Margo Lanagan. One noticeable difference is that First Nations voices are now visible in the genre, as exemplified by Alexis Wright’s novel The Swan Book (2013): in an apocalyptic future, an Aboriginal young woman is found in a gum tree, mute and with no memory, ten years after she disappeared. It is a far cry from the golden-haired fairies of Australia’s early tales. 

©️该文章及图片版权归联合国教科文《信使》杂志所有

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